The success of any business is largely down to the people you employ. But even if you manage to attract the best talent, you'll only get the best work from them if they're healthy, happy and engaged. And that's not always a given. The importance of employee engagement and wellnessWe all know instinctively that physically healthy employees are more productive than unhealthy ones, not least because they're less likely to call in sick. But mental health is also an increasing concern. According to a report from Headspace, 87% of employees say they feel a sense of dread at least once a month, and nearly half (49%) say they feel a sense of dread at least once a week. Despite that clear demand for workplace support, figures suggest just 31% of employees engage with health and wellbeing programmes provided by their employer.That's pretty dismal, considering these are typically free services that most people view as a perk. Clearly, something is going wrong, but YuLife has the data to prove that it’s got a solution—the use of gamification in employee engagement.Measuring employee engagementWhen your company signs up with YuLife, your employees get access to the YuLife app. But rather than focusing on employee benefits such as end-of-life payouts—never the most exciting of topics—the app's main focus is to encourage good health in the here and now, setting your employees daily mental health and physical fitness goals, and rewarding them for completing tasks.A huge 72% of employees download the YuLife app, 43% have used it at least once in the past month, and 17.4% log on up to five times a day. That's the kind of employee engagement most apps dream of… so what’s the secret? Well, there are many reasons for YuLife's success, but a key ingredient is, you guessed it, gamification.The app has been carefully designed with the principles of cognitive psychology in mind. Most importantly, its game-like mechanics harness people's innermost drives in a way that, ultimately, produces great outcomes for everyone.How gamification can motivate employeesYou might think you're not competitive, but evolution has programmed us that way. Millions of years ago, those humans who weren’t competitive were less likely to survive when food and other resources were scarce. Their rivals, however, were able to pass on their genetic tendency for competitive behaviour. Consequently, these are the genes that direct our bodies today and literally determine how we think and feel on a minute-by-minute basis. Of course, we now rarely need to fight for survival in a literal sense, but those powerful instincts are there under the surface, primed and ready to emerge when needed. Companies using gamification for employees So what's all this got to do with improving employees' mental and physical health? Well, most of us have experience of setting ourselves goals such as visiting the gym twice a week, or meditating every morning before work. But most of us also fail to achieve them, because "life gets in the way". However, at YuLife we've found that when you reframe these activities as a game—gamification—it drives employee engagement. The YuLife appThe YuLife app plays on our natural inclinations to seek fun, challenge, and reward, setting daily wellness challenges, such as walking, cycling or meditation. If employees achieve these, they get real-world rewards in the form of YuCoin, which can be exchanged for vouchers to spend with big brands, or donated to charities or environmental projects.You start out aiming to complete one mental or physical health challenge a day. Then, as you progress, you have the option of doing more; for example, embarking on streaks and quests to keep you motivated and progressing. Crucially, there’s also an element of competing with others, because employees can see how well they’re doing against other colleagues via the shared leaderboard, and they can also challenge each other to duels. You don't have to take our word for it, either; when Cloud International signed up with YuLife, 97% of its employees downloaded the YuLife app. Director of Operations Alix Hobbes was not surprised by its popularity: "After all, we're a sales business, full of highly competitive individuals who will compete over everything," she points. "The fact they could challenge each other via YuLife was a huge thing."To learn more about how companies have used gamification to boost employee engagement in health and wellbeing programmes, check out our full list of YuLife case studies.